I know the names of all sixteen of my great, great grandparents. I suspect that many people alive today cannot access this information without a fair degree of work. Looking at this family tree above, what immediately strikes you is the large number of Irish names. In other words, Irish people marrying Irish people. When my Aunt Karen conducted research on our heritage many years back, she found a very large number of Irish names, both as direct relatives of mine and those who married into the family: Mahoney; McGrath; Fouhy; Burke; O'Neill; O’Doherty; Murphy; Keating; Collins; O’Loughlin; Barry; O’Brien; Mullany; O’Keefe; Riordan; Kennedy; Driscoll; Lenihan; O’Donoghue; Power; Walsh; Ryan; O’Brien; Dowd; Heffernan; Toomey; Buckley; Vaughan; O’Meara; McFadden; McGinn; McCarthy; and O’Farrell. This is why the ethnicity estimate of 78% Irish does not at all surprise me. For the rest of this entry I will relate the Ancestry.com test results with what I already know about my family history.

Let's start with Mary Anne Cashin, pictured here, one of my great, great grandmothers on my mother's side. She lived from 1861-1901 and was from Waterford County, Ireland. To my knowledge this is the oldest known photograph of anyone in my family. Mary Anne, her husband, Maurice, and one of their sons, Michael, migrated to the United States. As the photograph below shows, Michael became an officer in the San Francisco Police Department.

The red circle in Michael Flynn's registration card for the WWI draft reveals that he was a "naturalized" citizen and not native-born.

The archetype of the Irish cop, much like the drunk and intemperate Irishman, is an old one in America. You'll find it in all of the Irish last names in the somewhat ironically named and reactionary "Blue Lives Matter" movement, as well as David Simon's The Wire, a television series in the early 2000s that took place in Baltimore. I can't say that I have expertise in this area, so others can feel free to correct me. But the basic story is this...when the Irish came over, they had few job prospects, the dominant, Anglo-Saxon majority questioned their Catholicism and "whiteness," and unlike German immigrants, few Irish had money to move out west, which is one reason why there are still so many Irish Americans in the American Northeast. The Irish found refuge in the Democratic Party political machines in urban areas. New York's Tammany Hall was perhaps the most famous, though the Daleys of Chicago surely must have relied on strong Irish support. While justifiably criticized for permitting the interlocking characteristics of trading favors, prostitution, and prodigious alcohol consumption, the party machines did provide a tangible benefit to the Irish American community in jobs and participation in the political process, which was at least nominally democratic in the small 'd' sense of the term. Closed off from other career opportunities and relegated to the bottom of the social ladder among whites, Irish Americans found in the police force a suitable career. This was a job that the political machines could dole out. And for over a hundred-year period from roughly the mid-19th century to the election of JFK, the Irish were loyal Democrats, beholden to the party machines that traded jobs for votes. I know from teaching both US and California history that the voting preferences of Irish Americans were one reason that Woodrow Wilson initially kept the US out of WWI (Irish Americans would not have supported a war fought on behalf of the British, their colonial oppressors) and unfortunately, they were also a driving force behind the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Racism seems almost synonymous with the white, working-class in America (Trump anyone?) and the Irish, perhaps at least in part because of the economic insecurity they faced, clung to traditional, exclusionary, and morally problematic positions that would theoretically elevate them above the social status of non-white peoples. Thus, the historian in me, in a valiant but fleeing attempt to be as fair as possible, realizes that no one, even one's ancestors, are immune from criticism.

In any case, the point of all of this is to say that a lot of Irish became cops. Most went to cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, but there were also sizable Irish populations in Baltimore, New Orleans, Louisville, and yes, San Francisco, my fav! I am proud to say that on my mother's side of the family, we have been in the Bay Area since the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

Of all branches in my family tree, I can go back the furthest with the Flynns. The second eldest Maurice Flynn, mentioned above and to the right, and not to be confused with two others by the same name, was born before the American Revolution and thus could not have been a U.S. citizen even if he was born here, which we was not. Maurice's mother, Johanna Whelan, was born in 1739, when some of the world's first novels and newspapers were coming onto the scene.

A few things should be pointed out in the blue map above, which shows Munster Irish immigration, indicated by the orange-ish dots, from 1875-1925. Some were continuing to migrate to Great Britain, especially if they could not afford the trip to the United States. Most were going to the urban Northeast and it's worth considering why. I suspect that the urban North, due to its industrial prowess, contained a lot of jobs that attracted cheap, immigrant laborers. But outside of small pockets in Louisville, St. Louis, and New Orleans, why not the South? What makes the most sense to me--and again, I pledge my non-expertise and welcome corrections--is that the South already had an abundant supply of cheap laborers in its African American population. Secondarily, Irish Catholics may not have felt welcome in a region that, compared to the North, was more ethnically and religiously homogeneous, dominated by Anglo-Saxon evangelical Protestants.

Because the Flynns came over in the 1880s, they were not potato famine Irish. While discussions of late-19th century immigration to the US are often dominated by noting the large numbers of Slavs, Russian Jews, Italians, Poles, Mexicans, and Japanese, there were still substantial numbers of English and Irish coming to America at this time. The later Johnson-Reed legislation of the 1920s established quotas that favored immigrants from northern Europe above others.

Staying with my mother's side of the family, we see her father and my grandfather, William "Bud" Smith, pictured here. I never met Bud and don't know much about him. But I do know that he was good with cars and fought in the navy in WWII. Bud's father, John James Smith, apparently born "at sea" in 1883 on the way over from Ireland, was a "hoisting engineer" who lived in South San Francisco according to his registration with the WWI draft. These examples seem to fit with the reputation of the Irish as being mostly working-class in the early-20th century. The fact that I have managed to obtain a doctoral degree, the first in my family on either side, provides some measure of social advancement, even if the money is not great.

This brings me to the present. I could go on here and believe me, I have many more thoughts and questions...would I recommend the DNA kit to others? From the standpoint of adding to their collection and forging connections, yes, but it seems it would be most helpful if people who didn't know much about their family history took this test. You do have to be willing to dispense with some money and it seems that the more you spend, the more the website gives you.

Why have so many Irish Americans become politically conservative in recent decades despite the Catholic emphasis on social justice and the group's long history of economic disadvantages and alliance with the Democratic Party? This is a definite downer for me. Is it Catholicism's tendency toward hierarchical authoritarianism and anti-abortion politics? Is it the trend, common among many immigrant groups, that as they become more "white" and more "American" that they also become less welcoming of new immigrants, a platform more closely aligned with today's Republicans? Is it the experience of being in the police force? Is it tribalism?

​Does the stereotype of the intemperate Irishman have any merit? My sense is that this has got to be more than just an urban legend. The "Fighting Irish" is the mascot of Notre Dame. Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan (bleck!), once said that one of his fellow House Republicans was "getting his Irish up" after being confrontational (for what exact reason I forget). And my parents will hate me for saying this, but irritability and argumentativeness are definitely family traits! It would be interesting to speculate about whether the fields of genetics can advance to the point of saying that so and so behaves in this way because of his/her genes. If there is a genetic component to our behavior, it certainly undermines the myth of the free and autonomous individual.

My niece, Tessa Josephine Campbell, pictured below, is the closest thing I have to a kid. I hope she reads this some day and gains some insight on her ancestral roots. She certainly has Irish DNA running through her!

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Disclaimer: This is my personal blog. While I do my best to offer reasonable conclusions based on verifiable, peer reviewed evidence, I neither speak for my employers, nor do I require my students to read or agree with the thoughts expressed here. Opinions are my own.